ONE of the world’s leading authorities on viral evolution says the only way to reduce the threat of global pandemics is to “fix the politics”.
Australian Research Council Laureate Professor Eddie Holmes, a member of the Marie Bashir Institute for Infectious Diseases and Biosafety and the Charles Perkins Center at the University of Sydney, told InSight+ in an exclusive podcast that respiratory syndrome severe acute coronavirus 2 (SARS-). CoV-2) was “quite extraordinary”.
“I’ve been working on emerging viruses for over 30 years,” he said.
“I’ve probably published as much as anyone in the world on this topic. In all the years I’ve been doing this work, I’ve never come across a virus that can infect so many different animal species like this.
“It has a certain ability to jump host species with remarkable ease; it’s an extraordinary thing. This is the most host-generous virus I’ve ever encountered.”
Asked whether Australia was doing enough to stop the transmission of SARS-CoV-2, Professor Holmes was blunt.
“No,” he said.
“In general, the response of this country has been good. Successive regimes, I think, have listened to science. There have been a few failures, but overall, it’s been pretty good.
“The main lessons we’ve learned from this pandemic are the threat posed by wildlife and our interaction with wildlife and how we respond to that. And I don’t see evidence of systems being put in place to prevent that this happens
“What we need is a kind of global pandemic radar where we are monitoring the people who live and work at the human-animal interface: live animal markets, wildlife trade, slaughterhouses, animal handlers and [veterinarians].
“They are on the front line. We have to watch these people, like canaries in a coal mine. And then we take that data and share it globally, quickly. And as soon as something untoward happens, we quarantine that area.
“Scientifically, that’s pretty easy. Economically, it’s going to cost billions, but it’s probably less than what we lost with the submarine deal, frankly.
“The problem is political. And until we can fix the politics, I don’t think we can fix the pandemics.”
Professor Holmes said any implication that the Omicron variant, which emerged in December 2021, was made in a lab was refuted by the location of the first outbreak.
“It arose in sub-Saharan Africa, where there are large numbers of immunocompromised people, due to [human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)] and others,” he told InSight+.
“This virus, in immunocompromised hosts, evolves in a very different way, picks up lots and lots of mutations. In these people, it establishes long-term persistent infections and picks up a bunch of mutations.
“The reason Omicron wasn’t one [laboratory]-The designed mutation – there is no way on earth – is because not only has the spike protein changed, but the entire genome has changed. It’s picked up a lot of mutations because it’s probably been in a compromised host.”
Professor Holmes lays the blame for the rapid evolution of SARS-CoV-2 squarely at the feet of Western nations that did not share their vaccines with poorer countries that needed them.
“Vaccine development has been phenomenal, but vaccine sharing has been abysmal,” he said.
“One of the reasons the virus has been able to evolve the way it has is because we didn’t give enough protection: we didn’t share our doses with countries that needed it.
“What it tells you is the fact that there are reservoirs of immunocompromised people out there, and we have to share our vaccine doses, not just because that’s ethically right.
“It also puts a brake on the evolution of the virus. The fact that we are wasting our doses of Novavax and our [AstraZeneca] doses, it’s a pity.
“The Western world is guilty of doing this.”
Professor Holmes told InSight+ that, in the US, SARS-CoV-2 had now established reservoirs in opossums, deer, mink and cats, among others, although it had not yet done so in animal populations in Australia .
What does this mean for our ability to suppress the virus?
“Absolutely, we’re stuck with this, probably forever,” Professor Holmes said.
“I don’t think it’s too seasonal yet. What we tend to see when you get a new variant is global sweeps of that variant.
“If there’s no immunity, it spreads very easily. If there’s high immunity, it will only spread under the right kind of environmental conditions (temperature, humidity, etc.), and that’s when seasonality comes into play.
“But I think we are not quite there yet. We’re still pretty early in the evolutionary phase of this thing.
“When a new virus emerges, in the first 4 or 5 years it tends to see a lot of stochastic fluctuation — a lot of random effects occur because it’s not fully adapted.
“There’s a complicated set of factors — some populations are immune, some aren’t, global travel — all of these things give us a random up and down pattern.
“It’s going to start to settle in, as it gets into that host-virus co-evolution. But we’re not quite there yet. We’re getting there, but we’ve got a while to go.”
Professor Holmes says that in terms of future pandemics, there were three types of virus he was most concerned about, all respiratory.
“Ebola is a horrible thing because it causes terrible, terrible suffering, but it’s not going to cause a global pandemic because it needs direct contact with the bodily fluids that transmit it. And we can always control that,” he said.
“Vector-borne viruses like dengue and yellow fever, while horrible, won’t cause a global pandemic because, at least in the West, we can control mosquitoes pretty well.
“The ones that worry me are the respiratory viruses because they are the ones that are more difficult to control.
“SARS-CoV-2 is your worst-case scenario, unfortunately, because it’s a silent spreader. Asymptomatic transmission is incredibly difficult to control,” Professor Holmes said.
“The three groups of respiratory viruses I’m most concerned about are obviously the coronaviruses — we’re discovering new ones almost every day.
“Influenza viruses might seem a bit boring, but again, there’s a huge diversity in wildlife, especially in birds. Birds have brought them into Australia all the time and they can be devastating.
“The other is paramyxoviruses. In Australia, we have Hendra, which is a paramyxovirus. Fortunately, it’s very rare in humans, but it’s getting into horses, and we think it’s coming from bats. In Asia, there’s Nipah virus, which is a relative of Hendra.”
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